Brian Cox

Chadderton

Brian Edward Cox was born on 3 March 1968 at Royal Oldham Hospital. He grew up in Chadderton, on the Oldham side of Greater Manchester, in a family that was comfortable but not grand. His father worked as a middle manager at Yorkshire Bank. His mother was a cashier there. He had a younger sister. It was an ordinary upbringing in an ordinary part of Greater Manchester, and nothing about it suggested that this particular kid would end up on the cover of the Radio Times explaining dark matter.

He went to Hulme Grammar School in Oldham, a small independent school that has since become part of Oldham Hulme Grammar. He got a D in his A-level maths, a fact he mentions often and with no embarrassment. What happened instead of academic brilliance was a book. At the age of 12, he read Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and something shifted. Sagan wrote about the universe the way other people wrote about love: with awe, with warmth, with the absolute conviction that this stuff mattered and that anyone could understand it. Cox has said many times since that Sagan's book was the reason he became a physicist. He also watched Patrick Moore's The Sky at Night, which did the same thing from a deckchair in Selsey.

But the first thing Cox became, before he became a physicist, was a musician.

The Keyboard Player

In his late teens, Cox joined a band called Dare as their keyboard player. They were a synth rock outfit from Oldham who made two albums, Out of the Silence in 1988 and Blood from Stone in 1991. Cox was 20 when the first album came out. He was good enough to be in a signed band, touring and recording, at an age when most people are deciding whether to go to university or get a job. He was doing both.

Then came D:Ream. Cox played keyboards with them as a live and session musician through the mid-1990s. D:Ream were a pop dance act fronted by Peter Cunnah, and in January 1994 their single "Things Can Only Get Better" reached number one in the UK charts, spending four weeks at the top. It became one of those songs that escapes its own era. In 1997, the Labour Party adopted it as their general election anthem. Tony Blair walked into Downing Street to it. The keyboard player from Chadderton was on the soundtrack of a political revolution, and he was simultaneously studying for a physics degree at the University of Manchester.

That is the detail that makes the Brian Cox story unlike any other story on this website. He wasn't choosing between music and science. He was doing both at the same time, in the same city, and apparently seeing no contradiction in it. D:Ream disbanded in 1997. Cox kept going with the physics. The keyboards went quiet, though not forever. In June 2024, D:Ream reformed for Glastonbury and Cox was back behind the keys. Some things you don't walk away from twice.

Manchester

Cox graduated from the University of Manchester with a first-class BSc in Physics in 1995. He stayed on for his PhD in high-energy particle physics, supervised by Robin Marshall, working on the H1 experiment at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg. His thesis, submitted in 1998, was on double diffraction dissociation at large momentum transfer. If you don't know what that means, don't worry. Most physicists would need a moment too.

What matters is that Cox was trained at Manchester, in the same physics department that Rutherford had built into the most important laboratory in the world nearly a century earlier. The department had moved buildings since Rutherford's day, but the tradition hadn't gone anywhere. Manchester physics was still world class. Cox was part of it.

After his PhD, he held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship from 2006 to 2013, and he is now Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester. He has never left the university. He has worked at laboratories across the world, filmed television on every continent, written books that have sold millions of copies, and lived in London for years. But his professorship is still at Manchester. The place that made him a physicist kept him.

Geneva

Cox is a member of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, which sits on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. ATLAS is one of the enormous detectors built around the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed. It is the size of a cathedral, weighs around 7,000 tonnes, and its job is to catch what happens when protons are smashed together at close to the speed of light.

The headline result came on 4 July 2012, when CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the particle that gives other particles their mass. It had been theorised in 1964 by Peter Higgs at Edinburgh and, independently, by several other physicists. It took nearly half a century and the largest machine ever built to find it. Cox was part of the ATLAS collaboration when it happened. He wasn't the one who found it, and he would be the first to say so, but he was there, and he was the one who explained it to the rest of us.

That is perhaps the most useful way to understand what Brian Cox does. He is a working physicist. He publishes papers. He supervises PhD students. But his real gift, the thing that makes him a legend rather than just a professor, is that he can take the most complicated ideas in physics and make them feel like they belong to everyone. He does it without dumbing down, without condescension, and without losing the sense of wonder that made him pick up Cosmos in the first place.

The Wonders

In 2010, BBC Two broadcast Wonders of the Solar System. Cox stood in deserts and on glaciers and next to rocket launches, and he talked about the planets the way Sagan had written about them: with genuine emotion and without apology. It was a hit. Wonders of the Universe followed in 2011, then Wonders of Life in 2013, then Human Universe, Forces of Nature, and The Planets in 2019. Each one pulled millions of viewers. Each one made physics feel like something you could care about on a Sunday evening.

Alongside the television, he co-presents The Infinite Monkey Cage on BBC Radio 4 with the comedian Robin Ince, a show that has been running since 2009 and that manages to be simultaneously rigorous and very funny. He has written books with the physicist Jeff Forshaw, including Why Does E=mc²? and The Quantum Universe, and companion books to his television series with Andrew Cohen. He advised Danny Boyle on the film Sunshine in 2007. He has given TED talks. He has appeared on every panel show the BBC has ever made. He is, by some distance, the most recognised physicist in Britain.

None of which would matter if he weren't still a scientist. The television could have swallowed him. It swallows most people. But Cox kept the research going, kept the teaching going, kept the CERN work going. He is still Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester. He still holds the Royal Society Professorship for Public Engagement in Science. He is still, underneath the cameras and the book tours and the Attenborough comparisons, doing the same thing he started doing when he read that book at 12: trying to understand how the universe works, and trying to explain it to anyone who wants to listen.

He was born at Royal Oldham Hospital and grew up in Chadderton. He played keyboards in a band that soundtracked a general election. He got a first in physics while the band was still in the charts. He was part of the ATLAS collaboration when they found the Higgs boson. He explained the solar system to the nation and made them care. And through all of it, he has kept his season ticket at Oldham Athletic, which tells you everything you need to know about where his loyalties lie.

An Oldham lad who showed the country what physics looks like when you're not afraid of it. That's a Manchester legend.